


Twelve Days of Christmas Confessions

by AceofHarts



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Christmas Fluff, M/M, Neighbors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2014-12-12
Packaged: 2018-02-27 09:58:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 21,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2688602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceofHarts/pseuds/AceofHarts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren decides that he's got to confess his crush to Armin before Christmas so that at best he and Armin can start dating, or at worst things can go back to normal before the holiday itself. Naturally, it turns out not to be as easy as he wants it to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

            Eren would have been lying if he’d said he was _surprised_ by this development. Eren’s and Armin’s mothers had been friends for years, and until Mikasa had been adopted their sons been two of the only young kids in the neighbourhood. Simple logistics had ensured that they met before they could so much as toddle. Sheer compatibility had kept them together through the nearly decade and a half that had followed. Armin had been such a constant that Eren had never felt that much need to interrogate their relationship. Of course, Eren had been thinking, for as long as he could remember, that Armin was almost overwhelmingly brilliant and cute and interesting and comfortable to be around and—

            The point was, it was hardly a shock that he’d developed a crush. If anything he was a bit puzzled that it had taken him until ninth grade to put that name to it. But now it was here, this little flutter in his chest, chittering away for attention. He thought it was only right that he should ask Armin how to proceed. Armin would know what to do about this, if anything. Armin always knew.

            Of course, Eren didn’t want to just walk up to him and flatly state, ‘I’ve got a crush on you and we need _tactics_ , damn it.’ Eren had seen and read enough romantic media to know that the confession was important in and of itself. After all, Armin had snickered at Mr. Darcy during the version of _Pride and Prejudice_ that had been on television last week. ‘Why bother saying it if he’s going to make it sound like he regrets it? He’s such a jerk,’ Armin had said. Eren wanted to be everything but a jerk, especially as far as Armin was concerned. Whether or not anything came of this, then, he needed to present it in a way that would say, ‘Hello yes I'd be so happy if I could kiss you.’

            Without _literally_ saying, ‘Hello yes I'd be so happy if I could kiss you,' if he could avoid it. Sometimes Armin laughed when he was surprised or taken aback or otherwise left speechless. Even though Eren knew that, he didn't think he'd be able to take it if that was the response he got. This was going to require a little more tact. It would have been easier, Eren thought, if he remembered how he'd become friends with Armin in the first place. If he'd had some method that had been effective all those years ago, some way of proposing the start of a relationship, it might have been easier to see how to go about suggesting a _change_ in it. As far as he'd seen in the old family videos his mother played every Christmas, his and Armin's friendship had started out with them crawling on, drooling on, and sleeping on one another. Somehow he didn't think that would go over quite so well this time. 

            This whole exploration had been prompted by a fit of winter drowsiness. Eren had no homework to do, and the warmth of the house had sapped his will to do anything around the house. He'd just been lying on his bed, flipping through the pictures on his phone. He took a lot, but rarely actually looked at them. He’d expected to find a trove of absurd and now-inscrutable photos of everyday objects, but mostly what he’d found was group shots. The common denominator in most of these, and the person often holding the camera, was Armin. Scrolling through five hundred photos of him had really driven the point home to Eren that this was becoming a situation.

            It also meant he had his phone right in hand, so the device seemed like the obvious means to get this important message to Armin.

 

**Hey Armin I just wanted to let u know that I really like you a lot**

****

            That was too lukewarm. If he was going to be that underwhelming and unclear he might as well not even bring it up. He deleted the text without sending it.

 

**Armin look dont be alarmed but lately sometimes I think about kissing u**

            That more clearly conveyed romantic intent, but it just felt strange.

 

**Hey Arm do u ever think about maybe what it would be like if we went on dates? I think it could actually be really fun if u want to try??? But if it didn’t work out that’d be cool too so yeah what do you th**

            His phone beeped, and all he had to do was look up a little higher on the screen to see that, naturally, Armin had been the one to text him.

 

**Eren this is very important in two minutes there is a documentary on about dugongs please come watch this with me it is the event of a lifetime I promise you**

**I've got popcorn in the microwave and everything and I asked already and you can stay for dinner**

            Eren rolled mostly off of his bed so that he could lean on his nightstand and look out the window. Armin’s bedroom window lined up perfectly with Eren’s own. The gap between them was narrow enough that they’d gotten in huge amounts of trouble as children for trying to engineer a semi-permanent bridge between their rooms.

            Armin was there in the window, biting his lip and pointing urgently away behind him as if the television could be found in the hallway. Armin took his sea creatures seriously. They’d have his full attention for at least the next hour, so Eren couldn’t very well have accomplished anything by pestering him with texts anyway. Besides, Armin could gather all the knowledge he pleased by himself, but even when he was sitting there reading he'd always pop up from his book every now and then to tell Eren or Mikasa or whoever else was around about what he'd just learned. It just wasn't the same if he couldn't share it. 

            Eren nodded at him and then launched himself away from the windowsill towards his bedroom door. Announcing a crush could wait. Dugongs and popcorn and a wide-eyed, enthusiastic best friend could not.  

            It didn’t have to be _today_ , Eren thought as he pulled on his shoes. This was December; there would be more sentimental moments and perfect opportunities than he could count. By Christmas morning they’d either be dating, or Armin would have turned him down flat and Eren would be consoling himself with a bucketload of iced sugar cookies. There would also probably be a lot of science documentaries and action movies involved in the recovery process. Eren couldn’t really imagine a situation like that without Armin and Mikasa there to make sure he ate and to pat his head occasionally. Whichever way it went, they’d have this settled in no time. Eren was absolutely sure of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't intending to write this, but then all of a sudden I had four chapters completed and eight more fully planned...so I guess it is happening? It's really going to be nothing but fluff. Since the chapters are so short I might be able to post them consistently! I'm kind of excited about that, since my other ongoing fic is taking so much longer ;;


	2. Chapter 2

            “This is just how it is,” Armin said through slightly chattering teeth. He had his arms folded and his hands tucked under them, but it didn’t look like it was doing him that much good. “The weakest people are given the worst responsibilities, since we’ve got no grounds to argue.”

            “We’re not the weakest,” Eren said. “We’re just the _youngest_. Which makes this worse!”

            “I think it’s basically tradition,” Jean said. “The niners get the crap gigs. I’d be fine with if, except—why the _hell_ did it have to be so cold?”

            Armin and Jean were both quite correct. Their music program’s first years were always relegated to this particular performance. They had to stand by the clock tower and play during their small town’s Christmas parade, come rain or sleet or snow. Today they were fortunate enough to be precipitation-free, but the wind was blowing hard. Each of the students had been allotted two clothespins to fasten their music to their stands. More than one band member had been heard muttering that it wouldn’t do them that much good if the whole stand blew away.

            “Actually, this is close to average for the temperature on this day of the year,” Armin said.

            “I don’t want to hear that even a little bit right now.”

            “Since when do you get to give orders?”, Eren asked. Eren, along with the other three or four trumpet players in their class, was set up behind the woodwinds. It meant there was a music stand between him and Jean, which was probably for the best.

            “Since when was ‘hey maybe don’t say things that make me feel like a whiny jackass’ giving orders?”

            “Since you started saying it to Armin.”

            “I don’t really care, though,” Armin said. He was on Jean’s side of the music stand divide. Much to Eren’s dismay, at the start of the year the pair of them had both been assigned to the alto saxophone (despite that Jean had desperately wanted to play tenor). Mikasa was a little nearer at hand. She was on trombone, which meant she’d be playing right next to him. At the moment she was helping the percussion section set up their drum kit.

            “Yeah, okay, take his side then,” Eren said. “I can’t believe he talked you into the shades. It’s six p.m. In December. In Canada. How can you even read the music?”

            “Not like there’s that much to read,” Jean said, flapping one hand disdainfully towards his stand. “B, B, B, B, A, A, A…quarter notes and half notes all of eternity. Actually, you know what, screw this.” He stuffed his right hand into his coat pocket, leaving only his left free to access the keys on the saxophone hanging from his neck. “I’m getting out of this with as many fingers as I can.”

            “Can you even play like that?”

            “With _this_ music? Yeah I can. Oh, and don’t knock the shades. Not all of us get to showboat with the melody, so we’ve got to _look_ as cool as humanly possible. Which we do. Right Armin?”

            “So cool,” Armin said.

            “Mikasa,” Eren said, turning around, “tell them they’re—not you too!”

            “I’m cool,” she said. Even with the aviators, Eren could tell that she was frowning in a slight but undeniably cool way. She, like Armin, had a Santa hat pulled over her head as well.

            “Well, great. You guys couldn’t have at least sent me the memo?”

            “We thought you’d be too cool to make a big show out of it,” Armin said. Jean snorted.

            "But not as cool as Mikasa, who's at a level where she can make a big show out of it ironically," he said. 

            "It's not ironic," Mikasa said with perfect seriousness. "I'm just cool." 

            “Here, though," Armin said, pulling his glasses off. "You can have mine, since I’ve already got a hat.”

            Eren stared at the proffered sunglasses for a moment before he was quite ready to take them. He turned slightly away from the others and slid them on with only minimal grumbling about how he hadn’t meant for Armin to have to miss out.

            “It’s alright,” Mikasa said. “He’s cool enough without them.”

            Eren couldn’t really deny it.

 

            The good thing about living in such a small town was that the Christmas parade was pitifully short. A few floats from local schools trundled along, a fire truck or two drove past covered in Christmas lights, the local pipers marched (and easily drowned out the band), and of course a float made to look like a sleigh sailed through at the end. There were a few other participants, but it was all over with hardly enough time for Eren to lose all feeling in his face and hands.    

            As soon as the band had finished its last piece—a shamefully simple rendition of ‘Here Comes Santa Clause’—Armin unclipped his saxophone and rested it on his case so he could go and help put away the drum kit. Eren had been assigned to help load all the heavy instruments into their music teachers' cars, but before he went there was one matter of business to take care of. He’d been thinking it over, and this was as good a time as any to get all this out in the open. Mikasa was going over to Jean’s house to work on a science project after this, and Armin had said already that he planned to walk back home. They’d have a good twenty minutes to themselves to talk before they got home and had families to avoid.

            Of course, before that strategy meeting could take place Eren would need to actually _tell_ Armin, and he hadn’t wanted to waste the whole walk fumbling over a confession, so he’d written it down in advance. If he wanted to save time, it made sense for Armin to just read the damn thing while Eren was still struggling with tubas and baritone saxes.

            “Hey, Jean—” He leaned over his stand and smacked the his friend's shoulder with the folded piece of notepaper. “Can you just—put this in the bell of his sax, or something—”

            Jean looked at the paper and then at Eren.

            “It’ll get all gross, you know. Just because we don’t have spit valves doesn’t mean everything’s all pristine in there.”

            “Eghh…” Normally Eren wouldn’t have particularly cared, but handing over a soggy love note seemed unwise. “Maybe just towards the outside of it, then? If it was too far in there anyway he might not see it.”

            “I can put it on his stand.”

            “It’ll blow away.”

            “I'll clip it down. If it goes, so will his music; he’ll have to chase it down, so he'll find it anyway. Is it what I think it is?”

            “Probably.”

            Jean lifted an eyebrow, and Eren swore to himself that if another person wearing sunglasses at night had the audacity to look at him like he was halfway as ridiculous as they were—

            _Oh wait I’m wearing Armin’s hahA. Oops._   

            The boy himself came hurrying back over to them at nearly that moment. Jean had hardly had the time to take the note and clip it to Armin's stand while Eren packed up his trumpet.

            “What’re you in such a rush for?”, Jean asked as Armin disassembled his saxophone in record time.

            “I’m cold and want to not be as soon as possible,” Armin said. He crouched down to settle the various pieces of his horn in the case.

            “I thought you were going back with Jaeger anyway. You’re going to be stuck here for a while no matter what.”

            “I am, but—”

            A harsh wind blew threw and toppled several stands that had not yet been taken down. Jean caught his own before it teetered over onto Armin, but this left him unable to intervene when Armin’s own music was yanked free of the clothespins and sent skyward.

            Eren watched helplessly as the note fluttered away; it spun up in a high arc and then looped away into dark oblivion. The sheet music, meanwhile, flapped away much nearer to ground level. Armin let out a small cry and went running off after it. 

            “Ouch,” Jean said as he and Eren watched Armin rescue his music one sheet at a time. “Tough break. Sorry about that. Maybe next time…?”

            “Yeah,” Eren said, even as he felt his heart plummet. He’d spent at least an hour on that note, and at the end of the process he’d actually been _happy_ with it. He hadn't thought he'd need a spare. 

            There wasn’t really anything for it. Today just wasn’t the day. Rather than wait around and mope—which was enormously tempting—Eren went and served his time loading instruments into cars. By the time that was done, the square where they'd played was empty, and Armin was nowhere to be found. Eren genuinely did not believe there was a single chance in hell that Armin would have gone home without him. He must have been around somewhere. With that in mind, Eren marched off to one of the nearby coffee shops and ordered two large hot chocolates.

            He made it back to the clocktower again just in time to see Armin arriving from the opposite end of the sidewalk with two tall paper cups in hand.

            “Oh. You had the same idea as me,” Armin said, lifting his own two drinks and smiling a bit. Given the direction he'd been walking, he must have gone to the slightly more distant, slightly more expensive coffee place. His hat was askew, his hair was going staticky, his cheeks were flushed and patchy with the cold, his damp music folder was stuck under one arm, and his horn’s forgotten neck-strap was hanging out of his coat’s collar like some ugly utilitarian tie. Any remaining impulse Eren might have had to just tell him how he felt, without the note, disappeared. Eren just didn’t have it in him to dump any more issues on him today. 

            “Ahh, it’s alright,” he said. “We’ll drink them all and get stomachaches. Might as well get a head start on the whole Christmas sugar overload.”  

            “Alright. Only, I got you a sort of...specific one, so we should probably swap, here…” 

            “Oh—shit, I didn’t even think to get you anything other than plain, uhh…” The moment they fumblingly traded drinks, Eren could smell how egregious this oversight had been. Mint was Eren's absolute favourite, so of course it was exactly what Armin had gotten him. He couldn't believe this. He'd been concentrating so much on how cold his hands were and how annoyed he was with the wind that it hadn't even crossed his mind to get Armin _his_ favourite. 

            “Plain's kind of what I feel like anyway,” Armin said with a slight shrug. “Let’s get back home before we actually get hypothermia. You can pick the movie. Anything you want. Even if it's objectively awful.”

            Eren was not sure what he had done to deserve this, but he could not think of a single thing about this plan that he disliked. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, so I won't lie. I just really like band AUs but am too lazy to commit to writing a full one with focus on the band. And yes I did put Armin on alto sax purely because I'm currently having to play alto sax in a Christmas concert. I actually have no idea what he'd play; I thought about it for a while but couldn't settle on one that I thought suited him more than the others (I kind of like him on clarinet, but also piano and flute and French horn and... I don't know, does anyone have any thoughts to share about this? I'm curious)  
> And I'm tempted to apologize for the number of times 'cool' was used in that one section. That is just legitimately how my circle of friends would have handled that situation. I've got to stay TRUE TO LIFE.


	3. Chapter 3

            The various departments and clubs at Eren’s school were always running fundraisers of one kind or another. Eren had only been attending the school for just over three months, but hardly a week had gone by that there hadn’t been a table set up near the cafeteria with cookies or cookie dough or variety show tickets on sale. In December, the senior band ran a Secret Santa program. All you had to do was pick a student, shell out a few quarters, and wait. During fourth period, senior students would go around to the classrooms and hand out the spoils.

            Eren had totally forgotten about the whole service until he'd tried to go to lunch and found his path blocked by furtive-looking people standing in the most absurdly conspicuous queue. He'd joined them by instinct. As he stood in a line that curled all the way down past the far end of the cafeteria, he thought the senior band must have been able to take a school trip to New Zealand by now. He’d been in line nearly since lunch had started, and he was close to the end now, but it would still be a minor miracle if he finished this up before the bell rang.

            He’d spent most of his time in line drumming his fingers on his folded arms and peering around in case Armin came wandering along the hall. He was short, which meant he had the (suddenly terrifying) ability to pop unexpectedly out of crowds of passing students. If he did that now, Eren supposed he’d be saved all this absurdity and a bit of pocket change. He was sure Armin would ask who he was sending candy to. Hell, they could sort all this out right here in the hall. Eren didn’t care. Maybe it’d even be a relief to just have done with it.

            _Actually_ , he thought as the line inched forward, _how is this even supposed to work, if he doesn’t come along while I’m here? It’s kind of…fundamentally anonymous. At best he’ll suspect someone somewhere has a crush on him, but I mean, look at him. Half the kids in our grade probably have a crush on him…_

Just as he was considering stepping out of line and making the girl behind him a little happier, the person in front of him moved aside. Eren found himself at the desk.

Sitting behind it, for reasons Eren could not fathom, was Armin.

“Ahh,” Armin said. One hand went straight for the attendance sheets, while the other held out a pencil towards Eren. “Hi Eren—do you know how this works? You just put a check by their name on whatever class they’ve got in last period—”

“H _i_ ,” Eren said, “Armin, uhh yeah no I don’t need to know how it works I just thought I’d stop in to visit, you know, since you’re working here apparently and all—?”

“Marlow’s sick, so he asked me if I could cover for him.”

Eren nodded mechanically. This was just really not how he had planned for this to go. Not that he'd actually  _had_ a plan. Not since that note had flapped away. He'd tried to recreate it the night before, but hadn't been able to remember what exactly he'd said and none of the words that he'd put on the page had been  _right_ and basically by the end of the night he'd wasted a lot of paper and a lot of hours he should have put towards sleeping.  _  
_

“Ok," he said. "That’s good. I’m going to just. Go now and.” He swivelled around. Armin got to his feet and leaned over the table, but stopped just short of catching Eren's arm.

“Eren, wait—if you don’t want me to see who you’re sending it to you can just—”

Eren didn't so much as glance back his way; he was barreling away through the crowded hall. Armin sighed a bit and sank back onto his chair. He looked up at the next girl in line.

“He’s a little weird,” she said. Armin shrugged and held the pencil out to her.

“It’s a weird season for a lot of people. Now, it’s a quarter per candy, and you just put a check by their name on these sheets here…”

 

Mikasa, Eren, and Armin had French class during fourth period. They all sat together towards the back of the class where they'd be more able to whisper amongst themselves. They were just in the middle of practicing a dialogue when Hitch, a clarinet player from the senior band, strolled in through the door.

“Candy clown time,” she said by way of a greeting to the teacher. She glanced at her clipboard. “Mikasa Ackerman, Armin Arlert, Sasha Braus, Eren Jaeger, Connie Springer, c’mere and get it and save me a trip.”

There were a few obligatory wolf whistles from their other classmates, but Eren wasn’t thinking about that. It was obvious that Mikasa would have received some. She raked in candy canes like nobody else Eren had ever seen; at home her desk was just covered in them. This was the first time he’d seen Armin receive one, however. The moment he reached his seat again after claiming his candy canes, he said to Armin, “So wait. Somebody just walked right up to you and ordered you candy? _From_ you? That’s kind of—tactless, or something.”

He wasn't so much worried about the possibility that someone else was crushing on Armin as he was impressed that someone had had that much sheer nerve. Maybe he could get some tips from this person. They could have a conference about how to go about this. 

Armin shook his head and opened his mouth, but Mikasa spoke first.

“You didn’t notice? You, me, Armin, Sasha, Connie. All the band kids in our class got one.”

“Hanji bought one for everyone who played the parade,” Armin said. “They said we did a good job, so we should get a reward. Besides…” He tucked his candy cane into his pencil case. “Once you get to the front of the line you can choose between two tables. So if you didn’t want the person at one table to see who you were buying for, you could always go to the other.”

Even though Armin was being mercifully vague about it, Eren felt like he'd stuck his face too close to the dusty old radiators rattling away behind him. He’d been so distracted thinking about what he’d do if Armin saw him that he hadn’t been doing enough seeing for himself. He hadn't even noticed he'd had his choice of tables.

The embarrassment only got worse. After class, while Mikasa was talking with Sasha, Armin pulled Eren slightly aside. He spoke in a low voice.

“I don’t think I’m running a table again after today, but if I do, and if you wind up at my table again…I won’t look at who you want to buy one for. I just give you the sheet, and I swear I wouldn’t look. Even if I did, I probably wouldn’t even know it was you who’d picked any particular person, and it's not like even if I did look (and I wouldn't!) and even if I _did_ somehow recognize a checkmark you left that I'd .”

“I just saw you there and thought I’d say hi,” Eren said, speaking perhaps a bit too emphatically.

“Okay,” Armin said, nodding perhaps a bit too quickly.

After that they waited for Mikasa in silence. Neither of them thought to make much note of the fact that Eren had in his hand two small candy canes, whereas their conductor had only bought each of their students one. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really enjoying this whole 'short chapters' thing honestly


	4. Chapter 4

            “Let’s go home,” Armin had said quietly, ten minutes ago now; and quietly, ten minutes ago now, Eren had gone to find his shoes. Whenever Armin said this he could just as easily be talking about Eren’s house as his own. He didn’t seem to draw any meaningful distinction between the two, and Eren was never quite sure which he meant until they arrived. 

            They'd been at Connie's house, but their host been falling slowly asleep sprawled on the couch, and Sasha and Mikasa had been engaged in an intense videogame battle that showed no sign of ever ending. There'd been no real reason to wake Connie up or demand a turn at the game, and if they were just going to be talking amongst themselves, they might as well do it someplace where they too could fall asleep without embarrassing themselves.

            It was long after dark, but bright Christmas lights in glittered all alongside them and away along the road. The streets were silent except for the faint overhead thrum of the streetlights and the thud of Eren's and Armin's shoes on the sidewalk. Eren had his nosed pressed into his scarf and his hands stuffed as deep as they’d go into his coat pockets. He felt so strangely _quiet_. Maybe it was just that he was muffled beneath all that wool, but there genuinely seemed to be nothing he needed to say or do other than walk along peacefully at Armin’s side.

            He would have been perfectly content to spend the whole walk in this way, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Armin’s face lift suddenly. Until just now he'd had his chin tucked down against the cold; whatever he saw must have been worth exposing his neck for. 

            “It’s snowing,” he said, and fell still. Eren paused too. They were beneath a streetlight, so the flakes were so bright they nearly glowed as they drifted lazily down. “I think it’s the first time,” Armin went on, “or I mean, the first one I’ve seen this winter. I think my mom said it snowed sometime last week, but I never saw any of it.”

            Eren hadn’t either. As far as he was concerned, that meant that this was the first snow of the season, even if only for them. And he and Armin were seeing it together.  

            That fuzzy sense of sleepiness evaporated. There actually was something he was supposed to be saying—there _was_ something he needed to talk to Armin about—and if he couldn’t do it now, when it was just the two of them in this cone of light and when Armin was looking up at the snow like it was the most beautiful thing that he’d seen in his life—

            This was the best moment Eren could imagine to say it. He could not ask for or expect a better one. 

            So Eren steeled himself and opened his mouth and said, “Okay Armin I think you’re really amazing and really pretty and I know this is weird and sudden but do you want to go out with me?”

            Armin looked over at him, but his expression wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t surprise or affection or excitement or even irritation. Actually, if Eren had to put a name to the look on Armin’s face, it would probably be ‘slight confusion.’

            “I…yeah. It is really pretty.” He reached up and pushed his hat up and over his left ear, the one nearer to Eren. “I didn’t catch the rest of it, though, sorry.”

            Eren brought his teeth down on his lip so hard that he nearly broke the skin. Even if he had, of course Armin wouldn’t have seen it—the scarf was in the way, just as it had been in the way of everything Eren had just said. As far as Eren was concerned, his scarf and Armin’s hat—all winter apparel, in fact—were responsible for today’s failure. He couldn’t just repeat it. He couldn’t just yank the scarf down and mutter the confession sulkily into his collar. He’d come off like a brat.

            Actually, he very much could do that, and was just about to when he caught himself. 

            _There’s still plenty of time left before Christmas, though._ If that hadn’t been the case, Eren would have just said it now outright, embarrassment be damned. However, he'd just had a better idea.

            When he did pull the scarf down from in front of his mouth, he said, “On Monday your homeroom’s going skating, right?”

            “Most of them. I think I’m going to stay in study hall, though.”

            “My class is going. I’m going. You should too. It might be fun, or something.”

            “Okay. I'll see if my skates still fit. Or I think the school has some spares, if they don't.” Armin tucked a stray piece of yellow hair behind his ear. “I didn’t know you liked winter this much.”

            “I don’t. It’s kind of the worst. But you like it. And it’s pretty. So I just think we should go.” He paused. “Unless you really didn't want to. Why weren’t you going?”

            “Nobody else seemed to be," Armin said with a slight shrug. "It’s not that interesting just…skating in circles by yourself. Is Mikasa coming too?”

            Eren shrugged and started walking again.

            “I’ll ask her,” he said. Possibly her presence would make things awkward, but he wouldn’t mind. Maybe her being there would make him feel more pressured to actually just spit it out. It was easier to work up his nerve when Mikasa was in his line of sight. 

            Besides, the trip to the arena was on Monday, and it was only Friday night. Now that he had a plan in place, he’d be able to take the weekend off from worrying about this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just as a heads up, the next chapter is not actually going to be the skating one (which is a bit later). ALSO, next chapter we get a happy break from Eren embarrassing himself, so there's that to look forward to.


	5. Chapter 5

            Eren woke up obscenely early that Saturday morning, long before even his parents could be bothered to wake up on a weekend. He had an important task to accomplish, so sleep had become a frivolous waste of time he couldn't believe he'd indulged in for so long. He spent the first part of his morning running around and desperately looking for his old hockey skates. He hadn’t played in a few years. His mother had yanked him in seventh grade after he’d gotten into a particularly nasty fight on the ice and been left with a concussion. When he eventually did find the skates, stuffed away with Mikasa’s on a basement shelf behind her lacrosse gear, they looked discouragingly small. When he pulled them on they pinched a bit at the heel and the toe where they hadn’t the last time he’d worn them, but he decided they’d do just fine. He could manage. They’d probably only wind up on the ice for forty-five minutes at most anyway.

            He pulled Mikasa’s hockey skates out too, since she’d seemed interested about the possibility of getting out of math class. As he hauled the lot back upstairs, he happened to glance out the window. The snow must have really started coming down the night before, after he and Armin had gotten in; there must have been more than a foot of it out there by now.

            He would have had no reason to think about it any further had there not been a knock at the door half an hour later. Eren abandoned his breakfast and answered the door only to find an extremely surly-looking girl on his doorstep. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old.

            “I’ll shovel and you’ll pay me,” she said.

            Eren scowled at her, but only because she’d started it. She was one of the neighbour’s kids—she’d come around last winter too, always before seven in the morning after any snowfall more than five centimetres. He was a bit amazed at her tenacity for getting in on the shoveling business before the sun had even fully risen, but that didn't mean he didn't resent it. 

            “Or I’ll shovel and _I’ll_ get paid,” he said. She narrowed her eyes. 

            “I’m saving you work, here.”

            “No, you’re _sniping_ my work, here. I mean thanks for the offer and everything, but I’m really planning to collect.”

            He actually hadn’t been until her arrival had reminded him. On the days their neighbour didn't poach their work, Mikasa generally woke up earlier than him and had the whole driveway and all the surrounding sidewalks clear before he’d so much as stuck his head out of his bedroom doorway. Today, since it was a weekend miraculously free of homework, she’d slept in. This might have been Eren's one chance to get some extra money to blow on Christmas presents.

            He had to scramble around for a while again in search of his winter boots, which he hadn’t seen since February, and for a shovel. When he was finally ready to head out, he opened the door and found, standing on the doorstep with his hand raised to knock, his very own next door neighbour.

            “I’m glad you like snow now,” Armin said as if they'd been mid-conversation, “because we kind of got a lot of it, and they’re calling for more. We might have a full metre before school on Monday. It’ll make walking to and from the rink take longer. Maybe we’ll miss part of second period. I mean, if I had to pick a class to miss, tech wouldn’t be a bad one…” Whatever forecast he’d heard, he must have trusted it, because he looked like some northern animal all fluffed up for winter. The only part of him that wasn’t buried under several layers of thick wool was his face.

            When Eren’s gaze fell upon Armin’s shovel, the latter boy started a bit.

            “Oh,” Armin said, “yeah. I know it’s probably not that sensible to start shoveling when we’re expecting a lot more today, but I figure our parents are probably going to want to be able to get out of the driveway, and anyway it’ll be hard to use the sidewalks as it is. I’m willing to do it twice.”

 _Well of course you are_ , Eren thought. He'd forgotten to even consider that they might be getting any more snow. What he said was, “Do you want to start with the driveway or the sidewalks?”

            Armin spun on his heel so that he could survey the scene. He subconsciously hugged the shovel to his chest while he did it and wobbled a little on the ice. All Eren could do was sigh and resign himself to the fact that no, he had never had a chance at all. He was doomed to be head over heels. 

            “Sidewalks,” Armin said after considering their options for a moment. His family and Eren’s shared a single, narrow driveway that plunged between their houses and opened up into some slightly wider parking space between their back yards. It occasionally caused some problems, but it at least saved time when it came to shoveling. “They haven’t ploughed our street yet, and when they do it’ll just fill in the end of the driveway again. We’ll have to wait them out.”

            “Sounds good to me.” Eren stepped outside, shut the door behind him, and hauled his shovel up to lean against his shoulder. “Where do you want to start? Your house or mine?”  

            “We’re here already, so we might as well start here. Unless it makes more sense for us to start at different ends of the sidewalk…? I’d be out of your way then.”

            Eren groaned.

            “If you’re still pissed that I hit you in the head with a plastic shovel when we were like _seven_ —that tooth was loose anyway! And it was an accident!” Armin's eyebrows went up. 

            “I’d forgotten about that. I guess we really should start at opposite sides.” Eren gave him a look. “Personal safety’s important."

            “Bullshit. You can’t lie to me. I had to chase you down once too many times to put a damn helmet on your head when you were learning to ride a bike; you've got no concept of 'personal safety.' It's a miracle you wound up out here actually dressed for the weather.”

            Armin snorted softly.

            “Fine. I just think you’ll be focusing pretty badly if I’m there, now that you’re thinking about the great shovel incident. I’d slow you down. Also I’d probably be literally, physically in the way.” He looked at his wrist, sighed shortly, pushed back his coat and the two sweaters beneath it, and glanced at the face of his watch. “If we go fast enough...”

            "Hm?"

            "If we make good enough time here, we might be able to finish the sidewalks just as the plough goes by. We won't have to wait then."

            "Oh, yeah, you're right. Also it'd be pretty good bragging rights, you know. Getting that much done before Larry even gets working." Armin laughed a bit. "You said different ends of the sidewalk, right? I'll start in front of your house."

            "I can get it," Armin said.

            "Nah. My shovel's pretty wide; if I start on this walkway here I'll probably just start screwing up the lawn. Your house's is a bit broader."

            "Oh yeah...your mom really doesn't like that." He stepped out of the way so that Eren could more easily get past him.  

            Eren hopped into the footsteps Armin had already left through the snow and crunched away to get started.

            It turned out to be for the best that Armin had wound up with the slightly narrower walkway. He cleared the path to Eren’s house as quickly as he could, and powered right through the snow covering the sidewalk proper. Every now and then he’d look up or over his shoulder at Eren as if to gauge how far he'd gone. He made surprisingly good time, though Eren had no idea why he was trying so hard. He wouldn't have minded helping Armin finish off the last stretch of sidewalk on his side of the property line. 

            They met at the centre of the driveway where the sidewalk crossed it just as the sun was poking past the horizon and the air was finally losing its bluish pre-dawn tint. Armin’s breath was puffing out noisily, and his face was so red it might have been glowing, but he was smiling.

            “There,” he panted as he leaned on his shovel.

            Eren wanted to ask, ‘There what?’, but at that moment he heard a low rumbling scrape and turned to look. Larry, the man who was responsible for ploughing their neighbourhood, lived on their block. His vehicle had just trundled around the corner, and as it passed by them, it deposited a small mountain of faintly brownish snow on top of the drift already running along the end of the driveway.

            “What the hell!”, Eren said, and turned to grin at Armin. "That was exact!" 

            “He's pretty consistent in when he gets going,” Armin said with a shrug, but he couldn’t quite hide that he was smiling a little too as he turned to face the driveway. "I thought it'd be sort of...nice, or symmetrical, or something, if we met in the middle at the same time he went by. I didn't think I'd be able to do it. I don't know... It worked, though. So thanks."

            Eren wanted to lie down. He also wanted to run around the entire circumference of the earth, oceans or no. 

            Armin did not seem to notice that Eren was undergoing this struggle. He straightened up again.

            “So I guess we get the driveway now, right?”

            This time, they worked side by side. Armin had been right that Eren would be distracted, even if he’d slightly misjudged the reason for it. Here Eren had been thinking he’d get to avoid thinking or worrying about asking Armin out, for all of two days. It just wasn’t meant to be, clearly. Armin had snowploughs to race. He had neighbours to meet in the middle, right at the dividing point between their properties, for the sake of some bizarre sense of symmetry or proving he could match Eren or whatever it had been. 

             Eren couldn't help but wonder what exactly it took to put a smile like that on Armin's face. He also couldn't help but note that he'd helped to do it himself, virtually just b being present. Eren really could not have been prouder if he'd aced every single exam that term threw his way. 

 _Come on, though_ , he told himself as he heaved a shovelful of snow onto his lawn. _I’ve got a plan, and it’s going to be fine, and I can do better than telling him while we’re shovelling snow even if Armin's a bit loopy today. Now pay attention so you don’t catch him in the face and have to take him to the hospital._

 

            When they finally retreated to Eren’s house, achey and soggy and exhausted, Eren and Armin collapsed in a heap on the floor by one of the vents. They held their hands out over the jet of hot air the same way they’d done when they’d been small and freshly returned from tobogganing. The vent was small, so space around it was precious, but they didn’t squabble for room. They both just lay on their stomachs with their hands held towards the warmth. When Armin’s fingers started to drop towards the metal grate, Eren glanced at him and saw that his eyelids, too, were drifting lower.

            “Hey,” he said, and squirmed a bit so that he could more easily nudge Armin’s leg with his knee. If Armin fell asleep like that he'd probably burn his fingers. “What happened to that plan for doing this again after we get more snow? It’ll take me twice as long without you.”

            That got him a sideways glance.

            “Not twice.”

            “Yeah twice, if you’re not there to strategize. I work faster than you do, but you’re way more efficient.”  

            Armin folded his arms beneath his chin.

            “We’re going to,” he said. “But it needs to snow first, and it’s not snowing, so…” He let his eyes shut and exhaled slowly. “So this is alright, for now, I think…?”

            “Yeah." Eren pulled his hands from over the heater and tipped into a more comfortable position on his side. The floor was warm against his cheek. "Just...thanks for coming to get me, Armin.”

             "Would've been no fun without you," Armin said without opening his eyes. 

 

            Mikasa came downstairs an hour or two later and found her two best friends sleeping there on the floor. She took a thick blanket from the back of the couch and draped it over them, and then pulled on her boots and coat and went outside. She’d checked the forecast when she’d woken up. The snow they’d been calling for that morning had been blown westward a little ways, so what they had now was the end of it. About two inches of loose, powdery snow blanketed the walkways the boys had so laboriously cleared. Mikasa picked up Eren’s shovel where he’d dropped it beside the front door and set to work. Eren and Armin had obviously worked hard enough already; she felt they should get to sleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay this got written and edited at five in the morning and I still haven't had enough sleep, so I reserve the right to revise it mercilessly at some point.  
> Also: I'm going to be out of town for most of today, which means the writing on this might get backed up a bit. I should have written the next few chapters in advance, but I've been unexpectedly busy, so...sorry about that, if any of the next few chapters are posted late. I'm still going to try to get them out on time, though!


	6. Chapter 6

            That Sunday afternoon found Eren stomping around the busy hallways of the mall, looking for absolutely nothing. The fact that he had ten extra dollars in his pocket after shoveling snow the day before was the only good thing about the whole situation, as far as he was concerned. Theoretically he was there to find Mikasa a Christmas present, but Eren already knew what he was getting her. He just hadn’t done it yet. Really what he’d wanted to be doing right now was scouring stores for Armin’s present, but it was a bit difficult when Armin was walking along beside him. When Eren had announced on his way out the door that he was heading to the mall, his mother had said she didn’t really want him taking the bus alone.

            “Go with Armin,” she’d said. “You haven’t gotten anything for Mikasa yet, have you?”

            And it was true, so he really had no one to blame but himself. He couldn’t very well say to his sister, ‘too bad about your present; I need you to help me sort out what I’m getting for the crush I haven’t told you I have yet.’

            So, he glowered at absolutely everything in every store they went to, including the sales associates and especially the other customers. They all seemed to be doing this so much more easily and naturally than he was. 

            “Did you get sick yesterday?”, Armin asked while they were poking around in a sporting equipment store. So far they’d spent one entire bus ride and one half hour in the mall in utter silence. "I guess it probably would have been better to change into dryer clothes before sleeping like that." 

            “No,” Eren said sourly, and nudged one of the tennis rackets on the wall in an attempt to prove he was trying. The odds of him finding an acceptable present for Armin in a store like this were virtually nonexistent. It would be difficult enough checking out with a present while Armin was at his elbow, but if they were going to be limited to only stores where they were likely to find a gift for Mikasa the whole thing was entirely hopeless.

            Eren wasn't actually very good at being entirely hopeless. A wild spark of inspiration struck.

            “Did you ever find your skates?”, he asked. “Do they fit?”

            Armin brightened right up now that he’d gotten a full sentence from his friend.

            “Ah—yeah, and they do. I was kind of surprised, honestly. I’m still probably going to fall on my face tomorrow, but at least this way I’ll know it’s me, not the skates.”

            Eren’s face fell. A cursory glance at the wall with the figure skates told him that he’d have no hope of affording a pair of them for Armin anyway, but it was all he’d had to work with.

            “C’mon, there’s nothing good in here anyway,” he said.

            This was what he said in every single store they went to, despite Armin’s very best efforts to find a suitable present for Mikasa. He was good at it, too. He remembered things she’d said she liked in passing months and months ago; he inferred from one movie or game that she liked that she might enjoy others; he knew instinctively what colours and styles and genres she felt most at home with.  

            And it was all so well-intentioned and all so crushingly useless.

            It wasn’t as though Eren had something specific in mind that he just needed to dart away and buy. If that had been the case, he could have simple sent Armin off to pick something up and then made his purchase as stealthily as possible. The trouble was that when he tried to think of what to get Armin, his mind became the barest, most arid expanse imaginable. Whatever the gift was, it absolutely could _not_ be anything remotely romantic. That much Eren was sure about. On Christmas morning Eren and Mikasa always went over to visit Armin and exchange presents while their parents all sat together in the Arlerts’ kitchen and sighed a lot about how tired they were. By the time all that happened Eren was certain he would have told Armin how he felt, but he was anything but certain that Armin would reciprocate. If he asked Armin if he wanted to go out with him and Armin said no and then on Christmas he opened something clearly intended to be romantic, it would be awful on so many levels Eren didn’t even want to think about it.

            What he had to do was get Armin the sort of gift a friend would get him, because Eren _was_ his friend and genuinely hoped to go on being that for the rest of his life, regardless of how this crush turned out. Since he had many years of experience with that kind of present, it should have been easy.

_Should_ have been. But wasn’t. Even when they went into stores that might accommodate both Armin and Mikasa’s interests, Eren saw nothing that was good enough.  

“I don’t know if you want to get her clothes…?”, Armin said when they drifted into a store that had little else of interest. Eren had already rejected most of the places likely to have something Mikasa would want, so Armin was broadening their range. “I guess it’s more sort of a parent thing to get, maybe. But she looks really nice in red, and I think she likes it.”

            Eren sighed at the shirt Armin had just pulled from one of the racks.

            “Do you want to go home?”, Armin asked.

            “No,” Eren said dully. “I just wish Mikasa had come with me after all, I guess.”

             “But we’re—I mean you’re…looking for a present for her…? I guess she’d do a better job at picking things out for her than I would…” He fumbled with the hanger as he put the shirt back. “Here, I’ll call her. I can get a ride back with whoever drops her off.”

             “What?” Eren blinked twice and snapped back to himself. When he saw the look on Armin’s face he would have sworn his heart had dropped straight out of his ribcage. “No, that’s not—aw damn it, Armin, I didn’t mean you weren’t good enough. You’re ten times better at this than I am. I just—I’m not really looking for something for her. I lied. Well I didn’t _lie_ , but I didn’t tell my mom that I really wasn’t looking for Mikasa, so…this’s all just been kind of pointless. Is all.”

            Armin, who was visibly trying to rally himself, decided not to question Eren about why he hadn’t just said so.

            “Are you shopping for your mom, then? Mikasa would probably be better for finding something for her too, um—”

            “No.” Armin paused.

            “Is it for your dad? Or someone from school? I can go if you’d rather me not be involved. If it’s like the Secret Santa thing—I don’t want to be in the way again—I’d better just go—”

            He reached for the pocket where he kept his phone. Eren caught the sleeve of his coat—just barely, just between his thumb and forefinger. Armin could have easily shrugged him off, but he went still. Eren released his breath slowly. This whole thing was such a disgrace, and it was only getting worse the longer he let Armin go on. He had to fix this, and the best way seemed to be to just be honest.

            “It’s you,” he said. “I don’t know what to get you. I’ve never not known what to get you in all the time I’ve been getting you presents without my mom’s help. Only now I don’t and it’s weird and I’m sorry I’m getting all pissed off about it. I was thinking maybe Mikasa has some ideas…? I didn’t mean—she’s better at this than you, or anything like that.”

            “Oh.” That possibility did not seem to have occurred to Armin at all; his face went totally blank for a moment. Then he frowned. “Well…Eren, it doesn’t really matter what you get me.”

            “Yes it does!” The cashier in the small store looked over at them with her eyebrows raised, but Eren was a high school freshman. He was used to getting looked at like he was the most irritating creature to have ever walked the earth, and just as used to not caring. “You always get everyone something really good or useful or whatever, you’ve only ever gotten me things that were really really great, and I can’t just toss a giftcard at you and call it done—this matters _so_ much!”

            A lot of people might have snorted and told Eren he was being ridiculous, but Armin’s expression remained perfectly serious.

            “Okay. I just mean, I always like what you give me. _Because_ you gave it to me. You know? So it’s really going to be alright. Even if it is a giftcard. Um. But anyway, I guess I should definitely call Mikasa, then, if you want her help?”

            Eren shook his head rapidly. He still hadn’t released Armin’s sleeve, and this was exactly why. Much though Armin’s presence was an obstacle, he’d realized the moment Armin had first gone for his phone just how much he really did not want his friend to leave.

            “No—you can—uh—help me pick out the specific one I get for Mikasa, since I already know kind of the basic thing, and I guess I really should pick it up sooner rather than later so I don’t forget. And then we can go to the bookstore.”

            “Is there a book you wanted to get her?”

            “No! It’s for you. You came here to help me and I screwed up and took it out on you, so we should just—do something you want to do, after this.”

 

            They never wound up going to the bookstore. Eren forgot all about it when he and Armin talked over the specifics of Mikasa’s present, and continued talking as if Eren had not just proved he was the world’s worst and most oversized petulant brat. He’d been so relieved that they were able to talk normally that actually making it up to Armin had completely slipped his mind.

            “Argh... Sorry,” he said when he realized what he’d done. They were standing squashed together on an over-crowded bus by that point, trying to lean out of the way of the other passengers. “We can go next time.”

            “It’s fine,” Armin said. “I could have said something.”

            “You didn’t forget?”

            Armin shook his head.

            “I don’t really need more books. I mean—unless you’re going to get me a book for Christmas, which I’d like! But you wanted to go there to cheer me up, and I don’t really…need that? Just going home’s fine.”

            Eren shifted his feet uneasily as the bus took a corner and Armin tilted briefly against him. He had the sinking feeling that this time when Armin said ‘home,’ he meant his own house, by himself. Eren also felt profoundly that Armin deserved to go lock himself in his room, if that was what he wanted, and to do it without first hearing a flurry of complaints. Eren had had plenty of reasons to be frustrated lately, especially with himself, but this was the first time things had gotten so bad that Armin had felt the repercussions.

            “Still,” he said. “Sorry. I’m just spacey and awful lately. I'm the worst.”

            Armin sighed harshly and scowled out the bus window.

            “You’re actually the best,” he said firmly. When he looked up again at Eren, he hadn’t stopped frowning. “I mean that. Even if you manage somehow to get me and everyone else something really terrible. If the worst thing you do is get frustrated that you can’t get someone a good enough Christmas present, then you’re way ahead of most people. Way ahead of pretty much everyone, as far as I can tell.” He finally pulled his phone out of his pocket, and this time Eren didn't try to stop him. "My parents are at work, so I'm going to call Mikasa and ask what she wants on a pizza, and you're going to tell me what you want on a pizza, and we're going to go watch all the Christmas movies that're on TV." 

            Eren stared at him. 

            "Why?"

            For a moment Armin's scowl broke, and he teetered so, so close to looking away and apologizing for his tone and burying everything he'd just said under six feet of flustered embarrassment. But he held on and bit his tongue for a moment and said:

            "Because you said we should do something I want to do." 

            Hearing Armin state precisely what he wanted, and especially hearing it phrased as effectively an order, was so rare Eren couldn't remember the last time it had happened. Eren wasn’t sure what he’d done to summon up all this solemnity, but he was dead certain that he had the best best friend in the world.

            Now it was just a matter of not ruining that. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is honestly as close to angst as this fic is going to get (i.e., not very close), so my promise of 100% fluff is going to be KEPT


	7. Chapter 7

            Monday finally arrived. Eren again sprang out of bed at a terribly early hour. Mikasa found him sitting at the kitchen table, already done his breakfast and dressed to go, with his skates hanging over his shoulder. He looked as if he'd been there all night. She raised her eyebrows and asked him if he could pass the cereal and did not press him further. 

            They arrived at school early, and walked to the rink quickly along with some thirty or forty of their peers. While so many of their classmates were just settling in for a morning of English or math or art class, Eren, Mikasa, and Armin were hobbling out onto the ice on skates that had taken them too long to tie. Mikasa was the first to find her legs. Halfway through her first shaky lap, her muscles remembered how good at this she was, and away she swept in long, easy strides.

            Eren and Armin’s progress around the rink was more fumbling. They’d been out there all of three quarters of a lap before Eren decided that he had been wrong. The pinching in his feet was worse than uncomfortable; it seemed to control the direction his feet went. This direction was somehow never quite the direction he wanted them to go. Armin seemed to be having a somewhat easier time. It had been longer since he’d skated, but his skates—figure skates, rather than hockey ones like Eren’s—were nonetheless a better fit. Eren had hit a growth spurt last year, which he’d been thrilled about at the time. Now he cursed puberty viciously.

            It wasn’t all bad. Though he of course had no intention of letting on that his feet were being slowly crushed, the fact that he occasionally took a bit of a wobble meant that Armin occasionally steadied him.

            “It’s more difficult than I remember,” Armin said after grabbing the shoulder of Eren’s shirt to prevent him from falling (Eren was firmly of the belief that since the rink was indoors, there was no good reason to wear a coat). “I’d say maybe my blades are dull, but I think it’s just me…”

            “Not just you,” Eren said, though he wouldn’t have minded having an excuse along those lines.

            “It’s easier to keep your balance if you get going faster,” Mikasa said as she slid up to them. She popped around easily and then glided along backwards just as fluidly as she'd been moving forwards. She stayed just in front of them, matching their pace.

            “That’s probably true,” Armin said, and took her hand when she held it out to him. Eren hesitated for a moment and then did the same. Mikasa didn’t so much tow them as set a rhythm for them to follow. Eren found his feet matching her movements naturally, but he kept his eyes locked on Mikasa’s skates all the same, just to be sure. He knew they were approaching the long, shallow curve at the end of the arena, so he was prepared for it when Mikasa released him and Armin and then arced out of their path.

            He was less prepared for actually taking the turn at this speed, and so was Armin. They took different approaches. Eren decided that all there was for it was just to power right through, and Armin tried to turn his skates just a little to brake gently going in and allow him to control his momentum.

            At the same exact moment, Armin’s right blade snagged on a chip in the ice, and Eren’s left one slipped to the side and then lost purchase entirely. From where Mikasa had just spiralled to an effortless halt, it looked a bit as though Armin and Eren had each suddenly become magnetized. They were compressed together in the most graceless way imaginable, hip to hip first, and then their limbs were all in the air. A moment after that and they were flat on the ice. They slid onwards in one unified, dazed heap; the top of Eren’s head bumped gently against the boards when they reached the corner. He wasn't even all that sure of what had happened. One moment he'd been accelerating, and the next Armin was all tangled up with him on the ice. 

            “That…that could have gone better,” Armin said as he sat up. “At least we wound up in the corner, so we’re less likely to get run over.” He readjusted his hat and glanced over at Eren, who was still lying flat on his back and looking up at the bright arena lights. “Are you alright?”

            “Yeah,” Eren said. He propped himself up on his elbows, or he tried—it wasn’t that easy on the slick ice—and looked at Armin. They were more or less alone, so he might as well take this chance now. “Armin, uh, look—”

            “If you two aren’t hurt, you should get going,” said one of their teachers as he glided by. “I don’t want to have to explain to four dozen parents about the great skating pileup of twenty-fourteen.” Eren frowned in his general direction, but reprioritized. He had to get this out before—

            Armin brushed the snow from Eren's shirt—where it was stuck to his shoulder, where it had collected in a crease near his collarbone. Every single word in Eren's vocabulary evaporated.

            "Sorry," Armin said. Eren would have told him not to be sorry if he'd been quite in control of his mouth at the moment. Armin and Eren always touched, easily, like it was nothing. This should have been no different, except that Eren's vantage point had shifted. "It's just I think you're probably going to get sick if you're soaking wet. Right before Christmas would be a pretty miserable time for it."

            Mikasa stopped just beside Eren and Armin. She would have gotten to them sooner, but it would have required charging through a passing group skaters from a nearby elementary school. Since neither Eren nor Armin appeared to be critically injured, she'd decided against it. 

            “Are you hurt?”, she asked Eren. He shook his head, but when it actually came to getting back on his feet again his ankle gave a painful twist and dumped him right back onto the ice.

            Or would have, if Mikasa and Armin hadn’t caught him. Armin nearly lost his balance again in the effort, but at the end of it all three of them had their skates on the ice.

            “Are you sure?”, Armin asked.

            “I’m fine,” Eren said. He glanced up at the large red numbers on the overhead scoreboard that showed the time. There was a fair bit of time left still before they'd have to go back to school. Maybe he’d better use it to come up with a plan. ‘Armin uh look’ was not, he thought, the best possible way to introduce this topic. “I’m just going to catch my breath.” Both Armin and Mikasa looked at him askance. That was nothing like Eren at all. Mikasa frowned.

            “Are you—”

            “Yeah I’m sure!”, Eren said, and leaned against the boards in as casual a manner as he could manage. “Go on—I’m just saving my strength so I can beat you in a race later. And I'm going to, so be ready for that.”

            Mikasa and Armin looked at one another, shrugged, and set off. Eren, quite pleased with what he considered a successful cover story, let his gaze drift to the ceiling again and thought about how exactly to broach this topic with Armin.

            He hadn’t been quite as successful as he thought.

            “Does he seem a bit off, lately?”, Armin asked, glancing back over his shoulder at Eren. He was just staring at the ceiling. Daydreaming like this just wasn’t like him, but he seemed to be doing it a lot these past few days. Mikasa nodded. “Do you know why?”

            “I’ve thought of asking him about it, but wanted a second opinion first,” she said. “He gets cranky when I bring things like that up, so I thought it would be better if I was sure I was right. Do you have a guess?”

            Armin faltered for a moment, bit his lip, and then nodded.

            "It's really only a _guess_ , though."

            "Your guesses are usually right." Mikasa listened intently while he aired his theory, and by the time he was done she had no real inclination to refute it. It seemed to agree with the evidence, and anyway she trusted Armin’s insights.

            “If that _is_ what it’s about,” Armin said, “I don’t know if we should talk to him about it.”

            “Why not?”

            “Because there’s really nothing we can do about it, and he’s been…really avoiding the topic. Maybe he wants to deal with it privately. I think he gets sort of insulted when he thinks we think he can’t handle things on his own.”

            “He might feel better about it if we could give him some guidance.”

            “I really have absolutely no advice to give though,” Armin said, shrugging helplessly. “I’m actually…kind of surprised he’s having trouble, if that really is the problem. I’d kind of expect he’d just say it. So he must be pretty nervous…” They skated in silence for a moment while Mikasa mulled it over.

            “If it keeps coming up,” she said at last, “I’m going to talk to him. At this rate he’s going to stop paying attention and walk into traffic and die.”

            “Okay. If you need any help, I’ll try,” Armin said. Mikasa nodded. They coasted to a more or less successful stop when they reached the spot where Eren was still waiting. He was frowning faintly as if he were running through math problems in his head.  

            “Do you want to try again?”, Mikasa asked.

            “I don’t really have a choice,” Eren said, grunting slightly as he pushed off of the boards. “I used to be really good at this. I—” He cut himself off by biting down on his tongue. Now that his weight was back on it, his left leg didn’t seem quite up to supporting him. The only thing for it seemed to be to get moving so that at least his right leg could take some of his weight.

            If nothing else, the fall ensured that Armin scooted right after Eren in case he should fall again. This in and of itself was the best sort of outcome that could follow an embarrassment like that. It should have made it quite easy to talk to Armin alone (give or take Mikasa, who stayed close for the same reason Armin did). It probably would have, had it not taken so much concentration not to fall down again now that Eren’s ankle was throbbing. It felt like it was inflating just a little every time his heart beat.  

            And oh, was his heart ever going fast. In all that time he’d spent at the edge of the rink, he hadn’t come up with a single good idea for how to do this. Maybe it was the tinny pop music being reverberated back to him from all angles; maybe it was damp seeping through his clothes after the fall or the shock of Armin touching him; maybe it was just the extreme awareness of all the other people present. But he couldn’t seem to think at all.

            So if he couldn’t think, he thought he might as well just talk. He could regret it later.

            He caught Armin’s sleeve again, the same way he had in the mall.

            “Is it alright if I—is holding hands alright? I don’t mean—it’s for a specific reason—”

            Unfortunately for Eren, that could be interpreted in two ways. He’d meant something more like ‘I don’t mean just for a specific reason, or just specifically right now.’ He was trying to enact a policy; he was _trying_ to manoeuvre with all the grace of a square-wheeled shopping cart into his confession. Armin, however, took the last half of that sentence as more of a standalone. As a correction.  _  
_

He looked at Eren with some alarm.

            “Yeah, of course it is, here—”

            As soon as he had Eren’s hand in his, Armin started tugging him quite insistently over to the side of the rink.

            “Wait, where’re we—”

            “You’re really obviously favouring your left leg, and—I mean, I wouldn’t normally think you’d admit you need help moving, so it must be pretty painful—”

            "What's happening?", Mikasa asked. 

            "I think Eren's leg really is hurt," Armin said. 

            Armin had him at the gap in the boards that led to the bench before Eren managed to file his protest.

            “What—no, that’s not it at all, I meant—agh—!”

            They’d reached the boards, but even just trying to brake so he didn’t hit them made pain shoot up Eren’s leg. One look at Armin and Eren knew he couldn’t pass his exclamation off as frustration. After Eren had gotten his concussion, Armin had been (very politely, concernedly) militant about not letting Eren come over to visit or do his homework or really much of anything. Rest was what Eren's doctor had prescribed, so Armin had done what he could to be sure Eren got it. 

            “You need to get off your feet,” Mikasa said. Before Eren knew it he was sitting on the bench. “Which foot?”

            “Or is it higher up the leg?”, Armin asked.

            “It’s—my left ankle, but it’s nothing—”

            Armin stooped to start on the laces of Eren’s left skate.   

            “It’s fine!”, Eren said. “Armin, stop, I—” He’d been confident that the triple-knot he’d put in his laces would thwart Armin, but what he’d said had a much greater effect than any knot. Armin stopped what he was doing and looked up at him.

            “Eren, please,” he said, “if your ankle’s broken or sprained, you could really hurt yourself by putting more weight on it. Just let me look, please? I’ll do my best not to hurt you.”

            “I’m not worried about you hurting me. I just…” It was really, really impossible to argue with Armin when he had that look on his face—worried and frustrated and sick all in one, with a good strong undercurrent of determination. He wasn’t going to stop looking like that until he was sure that Eren was alright. “Okay,” Eren said.

            The triple knot turned out not to be much of an obstacle after all. More of a problem was actually pulling the skate from Eren’s foot. He planted his hands on the bench and lifted himself to try to help, but when his ankle met the inevitable snag in the skate’s boot—”

            “Ow—shit—”

            “Sorry, it’s almost off, I—oh.”

            “Oh,” Eren agreed, while Armin dropped his skate. Eren’s sock had slipped down already, revealing the skin. His ankle was mottled purple and blue. “It—okay, but it doesn’t look that bad.”

            “Bruises get worse with time. Does it look like it’s swelling?”, Armin asked.

            “Maybe. Is it sprained?”, Mikasa asked.

            “It might be—I’ll go find a teacher—”

            “Wait, Armin—”, Eren said. 

            But Armin was already back out on the ice, trying to flag down one of their supervisors. Eren could have cried with the injustice of it. He put both his hands over his face and leaned back. “This is so…”

            Mikasa caught him by the shoulder and pulled him forward again before he could topple right off the bench.

            “Is your balance affected?”, she asked, tapping his forehead to get him to lower his hands. “Maybe you got another concussion when you fell.”

            “I didn’t hit my head.” He let his hands drop away from his face. “And he’d be a terrible doctor. ‘Ahhhh that looks horrible we’re going to have to take it off—’”

            “He didn’t say that.”

            “Might as well have.” Eren sighed. “I mean, how bad could it really be, if I kept skating and standing on it? I bet you anything it’s just kind of bruised up a bit.”

            “They’ll know at the hospital.”

            “Are you coming with me?” She nodded. Eren tried not to show his relief. He wasn’t afraid of hospitals, but it had been a long time since he’d been in one, and he’d never been without his mother at the least. He just wasn’t sure he’d know what to do when he got there. “Do you figure we’re going to get to go in an ambulance?”

            “We did walk here. I don’t think they’d want to call a cab. I could carry you.” Eren snorted.

            “Yeah, that’d be great.” She sat next to him and put her hands on her knees and exhaled slowly to release the tension. She was no happier when Eren was injured than Armin was—it was just good luck she hadn’t been at the arena the day Eren had gotten in the final fight of his hockey career, because Eren’s opponent would have come out of it with fewer teeth. She was deliberately restraining herself from interrogating Eren about any further injuries he may have had. He’d already been over this once with Armin, and pushing more would only make him angry as well as injured. Better to let the hospital deal with it, since he seemed to accept that he was going.  

            “I think Armin will probably call for one,” she said, “or make sure the teacher does. Just to be sure you don’t try to walk there yourself. Or to school.”

            “I wouldn’t do that.”

            “Yes you would. You’d be walking back to school like normal in half an hour if Armin hadn’t checked your leg. You’re just not doing it now because we’d overpower you.” 

            Eren bristled. 

            “That’s—" He couldn't maintain the indignation, given his personal history. He deflated a bit. "That’s probably fair, I guess.”

            Armin returned with one of their school’s biology teachers.

            “An ambulance should be here soon,” Armin said as he stepped off of the ice. “Mikasa, you're going with him, right?” She nodded. “Okay. I’ll—”

            “Not hop in a cab and follow,” Eren said. “Don’t skip tech.”

            “There are only two more classes left before break anyway—we won’t be doing anything important.”

            “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” the teacher said. Nobody paid him any attention. 

            “Maybe not," Eren said, "but if you skip tech you’ll skip math and if you skip math you’ll skip French, and maybe there’ll be something important in one of those classes. So go back with the others.”

            “Are you sure?”

            Eren nodded.

            “Yeah; nothing wrong here. Not even a sprain. I’m willing to bet on it.”

            Armin smiled a bit even though he looked like it was against his better judgement.

            “Bet what?”

            “If I’m wrong, you can…pick what we do Wednesday, and I won’t even complain about it. And I won't argue with Mikasa if you let her choose.” Wednesday was their first day of winter break; traditionally the three of them wasted the first half of the day trying to decide what they should do to mark the occasion.  

            “Okay,” Armin said. “Call me when you're home?" Eren nodded. "And I hope you win, honestly.”

            Eren grinned. 

            “Yeah, you’d better—because if I win we’re all coming right back here and we're all going to race, and I'm going to kick both of your asses.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY this one is completely unedited because I wanted to just get it published while it's still the proper day, so sorry if it's a mess? I'll give it a once-over later. That trip a few days still messing up my writing schedule ;;  
> Fun fact: when I was in seventh grade my best friend sprained or broke his ankle (I can't remember which) at a sports practice, and then finished the practice and walked all the way home on it without even realizing


	8. Chapter 8

            There wasn’t a lot that Eren could do once he got back from the hospital, and the list certainly did not include racing Mikasa and Armin, let alone beating them. The doctor had said it was barely a sprain, but Eren was given a pair of crutches and a boot and told to stay off his feet as much as he could for the next week. With any luck at all he’d be crutch- and boot-free by Christmas, but in the meantime he was more or less couchbound.

            An outside observer might well have thought that Mikasa and Armin had been injured in the fall as well, given how much time they spent in the Arlerts’ living room with Eren that Wednesday after school was out.

            _It could be worse than this, all things considered,_ Eren thought. Sure, he’d managed to bungle his confession again, and sure he got a lecture any time he tried to move. But it was difficult to feel really urgent about anything when there were back to back cheesy movies on television, and when he was squashed between Mikasa and Armin on a couch surrounded with food they’d been stockpiling for the holidays.

            Armin was not watching the screen as attentively as he might have been. At the start he’d spent a lot of time on his phone, flicking through articles online about how best to deal with a sprained ankle and occasionally announcing a potentially useful factoid to the others. He’d been getting quieter over the past few minutes. He didn't even realize that the movie they’d been watching had ended, and that now _The Nightmare Before Christmas_ was starting up.

            “Is this even a Christmas movie?”, Eren asked. “I don’t think it counts. They just screw up Christmas and go back to being Halloween town. It’s a whole movie about them accepting their inherent Halloweenishness.” ”

            “Are you suggesting this is not a suitable movie?”, Mikasa asked. “I think that would almost count as complaining. Armin, what is the penalty for failing to meet the terms of a lost bet? I think you get decide.”

            “It doesn’t really bother me,” Armin said. He’d sunk so deeply into the couch cushions that it was a wonder he wasn’t enveloped by them completely, and his chin kept dropping towards his chest. His phone lay forgotten on his stomach.

            He’d been full of apologies about settling yet again on just watching movies, but they’d all had a hard time thinking of anything else they could do when Eren was supposed to stay more or less stationary. Videogames and movies and cards and boardgames were about all they had on offer, so they'd decided they'd work their way through at whatever pace suited them. 

            “I’m not saying we can’t watch it,” Eren said. “I’m just saying, it doesn’t really fit the theme. You guys said Christmas movies, but this one’s more just…a Halloween romance movie guest-starring Christmas.”

            Armin straightened up suddenly as if he’d received an electric shock.

            “Right,” he said, “you’re right. Where’s the remote—”

            It had slipped down between his and Eren's cushions, but the moment Armin freed it he changed the channel. They watched a few minutes of _Die Hard_ before Armin remembered that Bruce Willis’s character was estranged from his wife, at which point he scrambled again for the remote, set the television to a channel playing _Home Alone_ , grabbed the nearest empty plate, and excused himself from the room.

            “Uh,” Eren said, when Armin retreated to the kitchen. “Mikasa.”

            “Mm?" She was watching as the movie's protagonist turned his house into nothing less a deathtrap, but she tilted her head slightly in Eren's direction.

            “Does Armin really hate all romantic representation in media all of a sudden?” Mikasa shrugged, and a bag of mints that had been stored up on the headrest fell down onto her shoulder. Normally they would have just thrown all their food supplies on the floor, but it was more difficult for Eren to reach down and get any when he had his leg propped up on the coffeetable, so the couch itself had become storage space.

            “It’s possible." She pulled two candies from the bag and passed one to Eren. "Some people don’t like looking at that kind of thing. Maybe he’s aromantic.”

            Eren paused before he'd quite unwrapped the mint. 

            “Is he? Has he said that? I guess you couldn’t tell me anyway.” He leaned his neck back against the couch. “I’ve really got to talk to him.”

            “I agree.”

            Eren looked at her frankly without lifting his head.

            “How much do you know?”

            “That depends on the subject.”

            “How much do you know about what I want to talk to Armin about?”

            Mikasa shrugged. 

            “That depends on what you want to talk to Armin about. I just think you should talk to him. In general. But if you just have questions about aromanticism, I can probably help you better than he can.” She wasn't very good a looking nonchalant, but Eren wasn't sure whether it was worth getting into an argument about this. He very rarely won. 

            Armin arrived back in the room with a plate full of cookies.

            “Wow,” Eren said. “How many more trays of those are there?”

            “We’re on the last one,” Armin said.

            “Why’d we end up with so many spares?” Typically the three of them wound up with a lot of cookies around Christmas. They were the standard Arlert family present to families they were close with, apart from the individual gifts. Traditionally Armin rounded up any that were burnt or broken or otherwise not fit for giving out and shared them with Eren and Mikasa.  

            “Oh." Armin reddened a bit. "Last night I made extra batch, since you hurt your leg, but I messed it up a bit and didn’t think they should be part of the official tin that’s going to get all wrapped up and everything, so I had to make _another_ extra batch, and… ” He was stepping over and around the mess they'd made, which included a lot of wrappers, a few plates, and Eren's crutches.

            "Wait, so we've been eating the messed up ones you made for me? They seemed fine," Eren said. He was at this point used to slightly burnt cookies, but he hadn't noticed anything particularly wrong with this most recent bunch. He'd assumed they'd just been eating extras.

            "They—they just weren't quite right, so I thought I'd make more." Armin wedged his way back into his space on the couch, which was just a bit too small for all three of them anymore.

            That last fact didn’t really bother any of them.

            Usually on the first day of the holidays they’d stay up as late as possible as an attempt to exert their freedom. That night they didn’t even make it to midnight.

            _Yeah_ , Eren thought when he realized he was the last one standing, even if it was only in a figurative sense. Another bag of candy had upended itself over Mikasa and Eren, and the last plate Armin had brought in had slid off of his lap and onto Eren's; Armin and his family would probably be finding candy and stray cookie bits between and behind couch cushions for weeks. There were plates everywhere, Eren didn't think he'd ever been so full of sugar in his life, and the channel Armin had last changed it to was now playing a years-old Christmas special from some crime procedural Eren had never watched. Mikasa’s and Armin’s heads were each resting on one of Eren’s shoulders as they slept.  _It could be a lot worse than this._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapters are my new favourite thing in the world  
> Edit: I just made a slight content change about the cookies. It's not really going to affect anything later, but I wanted to get it in there now


	9. Chapter 9

            Christmas was getting perilously close now, and Eren still hadn’t gotten anything for Armin. Armin’s assurances had been calming, of course—they’d taken the pressure of Armin’s expectations off of Eren. That said, they really had done nothing to change the fact that Eren could put enough pressure on _himself_ to condense himself into a small, furious diamond. He needed to do this well, even if that meant venturing out of the house on his crutches while his parents weren’t looking.

            There was one person who was more watchful than either of his parents, and he was happy to have her on his side, both when he was sneaking out and after the fact. This time, when Eren went out looking for a present, Mikasa was with him. Armin was there somewhere in the mall too—he’d wandered off with Jean when Eren had suggested that actually they might get more accomplished if they’d split up—but they hadn’t crossed paths so far. They were in the only other mall within an hour of home, and it was famously stranger than the first. There were one or two shops where you could buy jeans or weird custom t-shirts, but other than that, few of the typical mall staples were present. There were no bookstores, no electronics stores, no videogame stores; even the foodcourt was somewhat suspect. What the place did have was a music store, a Christmas store, a store that specialized in infomercial products, and a store purportedly selling carpets but which had windows full of knickknacks and for some reason swords. There were a few branches of the place that Eren had never ventured into before, so he’d decided that he might as well risk it. He didn't have much to lose at this point. 

            Somehow he and Mikasa had wound up in a store apparently centred around outdated memes. Eren was not sure how such a store could exist, and had decided that it was probably a front for some criminal organization. No legitimate place of business could possibly stay afloat with ragecomic shirts as their primary product.

            At least he felt he could be reasonably sure that Armin wouldn’t wander in here. Of course the odds of him actually finding a good present for him in here were slim to none, too, so it wasn’t that much of an advantage. The same glower he’d worn at the other mall with Armin was just starting to creep over his face when Mikasa spoke.

            “Do you have a crush on someone?”, she asked when they were in plain view of an enormously bored-looking cashier.

            “What no,” Eren said, far too fast.

            “You’ve been acting strangely.”

            “It’s Christmas! A lot of people act weird at Christmas!”

            “Do a lot of people scowl at literally everything at Christmas?”

            “I’m having to get around on crutches! Do you know how much harder that makes being in stores? Everybody looks at me like I’m going to shatter their entire livelihood. You should’ve let me leave them at home—I don’t need them. Or maybe I got your Christmas present in this store, and am annoyed because I think you’re going to find it.” Mikasa’s eyebrows lifted. Before she could express her sincere hope that Eren did not get her something from this store, Eren decided to hell with it. She was on to him, and really it was probably for the best anyway. “Okay, no, hang on, you’re right. It's Armin. I've got a crush on Armin.” It was such an enormous relief to say that and have someone hear it, even if he was also being stared at by a probably member of the mob as well as all manner of mugs and t-shirts and notebooks bearing trollfaces.

            “Alright.” Mikasa looked as if she was trying to seem surprised, but her face wasn’t quite backing her up. Eren supposed that was good. If it didn’t shock Mikasa it probably wouldn’t shock Armin, which meant that hopefully he wouldn’t get outright laughed at as penalty for being too abrupt. “You haven’t told him.”

            “No, I _know_ —every time I try to, either I screw up or the universe shuts me right down. Every single time!”

            “Hm.” She looked over her shoulder as if expecting Armin and Jean to materialize in the store’s entryway. “I could tell him for you.”

            The universe would not dare intervene, should Mikasa take it upon herself to deliver the message. Eren was sure of that. His pride, however, prevented him from accepting. 

            “What is this, fourth grade? I’m going to tell him.”

            “But you haven’t been.”

            “I  _will_. It’s not like I haven’t been trying, alright? Let’s get out of here—there’s nothing here for him.”

            A few stores later, Mikasa said, “Is it really that important?”

            They’d found their way to more familiar ground—the music store, which they’d already hit once or twice that school year even though they’d all only been playing for a few months. Eren was flipping with increasing anger through boxes of sheet music for alto sax, but he paused for a moment when Mikasa spoke. They’d said little since their last conversation, so he knew just what she meant.

            “To me, yeah! I think I should at least _tell_ him—it might get weird if I don’t.” He continued the search through the music, but his brow wasn’t furrowed this time. “I don’t like him not knowing.”

            They didn’t really keep secrets from each other. None of them did. Eren, Mikasa, and Armin were all supposed to be in this together. Trying to hide something like this from Armin, even though it was just so he could present it in the best possible way later, felt like a breach of some unspoken law.

            At least Mikasa knew now. That improved his outlook a bit.

            Not only did she know, but also, she seemed to have been strangely prepared for this whole revelation.

            “I don’t mean that,” she said. “I agree that you should tell him. I mean, is how you feel about him romantically really that much stronger than how you felt about him before? You’ve felt very strongly about Armin for a very long time. Is this more, or just different?”

            “Oh.” He let his weight fall on the crutches a bit more fully than he’d been willing to so far that day. “When you put it like that…”

            “I’m not denying that you’re under more pressure than usual. I just mean, try to remember that even though you are infatuated with him at the moment, he is still your best friend. And that you’ve been successfully being best friends with him since before either of you could talk. You’re good at it. You can trust your instincts, here.”

            “I—yeah. Okay, you’re right.” Mikasa nodded once, with finality, and then went to see if she could find any trombone music with a decent melody line. When Eren couldn’t find anything he wanted he went over to join her, but he didn’t quite make it. He stopped midway across the store.  

            “Hey,” he said, “are you seeing that?” Mikasa looked up from the shelf she’d been examining.

            “Seeing what?” Eren pointed at the wall behind the cash register. Up higher it was lined with actual musical instruments—a few altos, half a dozen flutes, a clarinet or two. But below this display, on the same shelf where they kept the reeds and the valve oil, was an assortment of seemingly random paraphernalia. Items of totally variable usefulness and relevance.

            Eren had spotted one of the least relevant of all. He knew exactly what he was getting Armin for Christmas.

            It was a good thing he’d found it at just that moment, too. Right as he finished paying for it and was handed the bag, Armin and Jean walked past the store and spotted Eren and Mikasa.

            “Hey,” Jean said. Mikasa nodded at him in greeting and stepped strategically to block Eren from view. Eren, meanwhile, shoved his purchase down the neck of his coat, since this was clearly the rational thing to do. He could have taken his time with it a bit more, since Armin was looking politely the other way, but he didn't realize that until after the deed was done.

            “How did it go?”, Mikasa asked.

            “Terrible,” Jean said. “Buying presents for moms is the most difficult thing in the world, I don’t even care. We picked up food though." He lifted a large white bag he’d been carrying a bit higher.

            Eren and Mikasa eyed the bag suspiciously.

            "From the food court?", Eren asked. Jean grimaced. 

            "I've got more survival instincts than that. We went to the next plaza over. If you two are finished buying your grand piano or whatever, we can go eat and call it a successful trip.”

            “I’m done,” Mikasa said, and then glanced at Eren.

            “Yeah,” he said, “I’m about ready.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cutting it kind of close on this one but it's before midnight so it COUNTS


	10. Chapter 10

            On the far side of the block Eren, Mikasa, and Armin called home, there lived a man who threw a party every year, two days before Christmas. It started at about six and went on as long as people felt like staying, and all of the neighbours were invited. Canny parents would send their children home sometime around nine o’clock, so that the adults could break out the alcohol.

            Eren was a few years deep in the stage where he found this kind of gathering awkward. He wasn’t young enough that anyone put on a movie to keep him entertained, and not old enough to drink or really feel part of the adult conversations. If Armin and Mikasa hadn’t been there he didn’t know what he would have done with himself.

            Even with them there, all they really did was stand in a corner and talk amongst themselves at a quiet enough volume that people wouldn’t hear them over the music and barge into the conversation. Occasionally they had to field a question from a neighbour about how old they were now and how school was going; generally they responded as a unit. This year the interruptions seemed quite sparse. Eren wondered whether it was because they were a bunch of surly-looking teenagers now. Maybe the adults just didn’t think they were young enough to be cute or old enough to be interesting.

            Eren couldn’t stop checking his phone—not on the off-chance that someone had sent him a text, but so he could see the time. The sooner nine o’clock came, the sooner he could get the hell out of here. He had presents to wrap, and even had that not been the case, the list of things he'd rather be doing was longer than he was tall. 

            “I’m going to make a run,” Eren said. Every few minutes they took turns darting out towards the food tables, gathering up rations, and heading back. Traditionally each of them would do this an equal number of times, but given that he had two crutches to contend with, it was more difficult for Eren to balance three plates.

            “No you’re not,” Mikasa said. “It’s my turn.”

            “I’ve missed the last five turns!”

            “Because you’re not in the running.” She swiped his paper plate and Armin’s and stalked off towards the tables.

            Eren grumbled incoherently about people stepping on his dignity.

            But he could work with this. The music was loud, and everyone else was talking to each other; there was no reason to expect any sudden interruptions. If it went badly, this was an easy situation for Armin to retreat from. Nobody would question that a teenager had simply gotten bored and wanted to leave the party.

            Eren cleared his throat a bit and glanced up at the ceiling as if expecting help from on high.

            “Armin, look, I just want to say—oh fuck.” He’d just realized why the adults were mostly leaving them alone. He had never seen mistletoe before, but he didn’t think it was that likely that someone had taped a sprig of some other plant to the ceiling, given the circumstances. “Uhhhh…”

            Armin looked up. His eyes widened for a moment.  

            “Well, it's alright,” he said. “It’s just traditional, and anyway I think it’s more for the adults. Plus they put it in the wrong spot! It’s supposed to go in a doorway, isn’t it? They probably just put it in the corner to try to discourage people from lurking here. See, look, there's some in that corner too.”

            Eren looked; there really was another bundle hanging over the far corner of the room. Everyone but the three local high school students had noticed and been avoiding the corners. Nobody was looking their way, so they didn't even get the typical hooting and calls to kiss. Everyone had probably already snickered themselves out about the situation and moved on with their party.  

            "I guess we should probably move before someone tries to make us," Eren said, because if this month had taught him anything it was that good luck wouldn't hold. If they hung around there too long someone was going to make trouble about it, especially now that Mikasa had gone. People were less inclined to try to have jokes at her expense.

            "Ah—yeah, you're right. I mean it would be awkward for you, so—" Armin suddenly looked a lot like he'd just stepped into cold water, and his expression stayed fixed like that when he went on. "I don't mean  _just_ you, only that—it'd be awkward for anyone. It's kind of a whole tradition predicated on making people feel awkward!" 

            "...Yeah, sure," Eren said. His eyes had narrowed slightly. "You kind of seem to be taking it  _extra_ awkwardly, though. Is there a reason for that, or what?" He was trying not to come off as a bit dejected about Armin's vehemence (which he was), or offended by it (which he wasn't). Mostly he was just genuinely confused. Armin had never been squeamish about much of anything before, including discussing romance or even sex. He'd been one of the few kids who didn't snicker during sex ed, and the only one in their class who'd always just throw his hand up and ask a question if he had one. Kissing in movies had never bothered him until their marathon the other night, either.  _  
_

            But now he was outright squirming where he stood, and it was the strangest thing Eren had ever seen in his life. That was saying something, given that through Armin's influence Eren's life had been full of a lot of documentaries about manatees and river critters and prehistoric beasts.  

            “Oh, no, it’s not me," Armin said. Eren looked at him, hard, but didn't see any sign that he was lying. "I just thought you probably would want to get out of here.” Eren took a bracing breath. 

            “Well, what if I were actually more than okay with it?” Armin looked totally blindsided for a moment. Then he blinked twice and said:

            "Then I wouldn't mind! Not at all. Maybe it'd be nice. I don't know. I think I came out against the whole practice a bit harsher than I really meant." 

            “So then it's actually alright if we..."

            "Yeah, absolutely. Here." Armin had to hold onto the front of Eren’s shirt and tilt himself up a bit, but with these measures taken it was easy enough to kiss Eren’s cheek.

            Eren’s entire face immediately went numb, and he was certain that his brain had been replaced with so much static-charged fuzz. All he could really feel was this patch of warmth—soft, so incredibly soft—just below his left eye. It became difficult not to fall right off his crutches. “Is that okay?”, Armin asked. "I know it's usually supposed to be on the lips, but I didn't think I should spring that on you just because someone slapped a plant on the ceiling."

 

            Eren nodded so quickly that it was more a vibration than anything.

            “Yyyeah,” he said, “yeah, that’s okay.” Honestly, he didn't know that he would have survived, had Armin kissed him on the lips. 

            Mikasa returned with food nearly that same moment. Eren took the plate she’d brought him, but didn’t really register what any of the food looked or tasted like. Within a few minutes he recovered enough to notice the time. They went home fifteen minutes later—Eren and Mikasa to their house, and Armin to his. None of them mentioned what had happened. Mikasa had seen it, and she raised her eyebrow at Eren as she unlocked the front door, but made no comment. Maybe Armin just didn't feel it was noteworthy enough to remark. He'd snapped right back to normal even before he'd kissed Eren, and had parted from the other two with a quite simple 'See you later!'

            When Eren got inside, he went straight to his room and went to bed. By the time he fell asleep, his face was still tingling.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's weird to me that this is almost done, since I normally take so long with multi-chapter fics. It's probably good practice or something...?


	11. Chapter 11

            Eren slept late on Christmas Eve. He didn’t find his way out of bed until past noon, by which point Mikasa had finished wrapping all of her presents and positioned them beneath the tree. She was stretched out on the living room’s sofa with a snowman mug balanced on her stomach. There were scraps of wrapping paper and crumpled up bits of tape all over the room, and the carpet was blanketed almost entirely with tissue paper.

            “Have you finished yours yet?”, she asked when she saw him looking at the mess.

            “Not all of them.”

            “Do you want any help?”

            “You can add the labels if you want, but that’s about it.” She gave him a look. Mikasa, who naturally excelled at most things, always managed to make an unsalvageable mess of wrapping presents. The colourful parcels now positioned beneath the tree were lumpy and asymmetrical and covered in far more tape than should ever have been necessary.

            “Get started now, then,” she said. “Sasha wants me to go over and help with hers later.”

            Eren snorted.

            “Poor Sasha.”

            Mikasa pretended she hadn’t heard.

 

            Once Eren had a small hillside of wrapped presents sitting before him, and once Mikasa was pulling on her coat, it occurred to Eren that he’d had zero contact with Armin that day. Of course it was common enough for that to happen, but it was strange so near to Christmas. Eren hoped it wasn’t because of what had happened at the party. He wasn't used to seeing Armin looking that uncomfortable. 

            “Have you heard from Armin at all?”, he called towards the hallway where Mikasa was now buckling up her boots.

            She poked her head through the doorway.

            “I don’t think he’d go through me if he wanted to talk about the fact that he kissed you yesterday,” she said. Eren blushed furiously to hear that spoken out loud, but felt strangely triumphant about it. “He’ll text you if he wants to talk about it. Or you’ll text him. If this goes badly, let me know. On my way home from Sasha’s I’ll pick up some food.”  

            “Right,” he said, “uh. Thanks.”

            “I don’t think it will go badly, by the way.” And then she was out the door.

 

            All there seemed to do now was find out whether Armin was home. Eren had decided he'd rather tell him face to face than over text, even if he made a fumbling, stammering mess of it. So, he sent a preliminary text along.

**Hey Arm whats up are ur parents at work or do they have u busy preparing for some holiday mayhem or whats happening basically**

            He didn’t get a response after five minutes, or after ten, so he started cleaning up the wreckage from wrapping presents. After that he forgot to be nervous, and simply went on with his day. When his parents got in from shopping (for Christmas dinner, not Christmas parents), he helped bring in the groceries and put them away, and then chopped vegetables to help with prep work.

            That evening, when he was poking around the presents and trying to guess what Mikasa had gotten him, his phone went off. In his haste to extract himself and find his phone, he nearly whacked his head on the underside of the tree. 

            It turned out that it was Jean, and not Armin, who’d messaged him.

 

**My mom wants to know if you’re going to stop in tomorrow**

**And by you’re I mean you and mikasa and armin they’re just not answering my texts where even are they**

**Mikasas at Sashas and I dont know what Armins doing and why didnt u text me at the same time as them**

**What is this**

**I texted them first bc they don’t get all unnecessarily confrontational**

**Unlike some people**

**Who are named eren**

**Anyway are you coming by or not**

**Pls say yes there’s so much food here already and she’s not stopping**

**I’ll die**

**Yeah fine but only so we can save ur sorry ass**

**Also bc your moms cooking is great though tell her I said hi**

**Yeah yeah merry christmas eve or whatever**

**is that a thing people say**

**Idk works for me see u tomorrow i guess**

            Eren slipped his phone back into his pocket. He didn’t know what to make of the fact that Armin wasn’t texting Jean, either. He supposed it was good news that he wasn’t the only one getting the silent treatment.

            Knowing Armin, and knowing that they weren’t in the middle of exams, it probably wasn’t deliberate. The Arlerts did always go to visit Armin’s grandfather on Christmas Eve as well as Christmas day. Eren thought no more of it all the way through dinner or in the hours after. It didn’t even occur to him until that night when he’d gotten ready for bed. He checked the clock on his phone more out of habit than anything, and realized that Armin had never texted him back.

            Time was another concern. If he wanted to tell Armin before Christmas, he had to do it within the next five minutes. Armin must have been back from visiting his grandfather by now. Eren thought of sending him another text, but paused first. There was still the off-chance that Armin _had_ been deliberately ignoring Eren, but just hadn’t contacted Jean because he’d been busy at the moment.

            If Armin was avoiding him, Eren didn’t really want to bother him. The best way to solve this problem was to talk to Jean. 

 

**Hey did armin ever get back to u**

**Nah**

**K thanks**

            This confirmed in Eren’s mind that Armin had not checked his messages at all. Probably he’d turned his phone off while visiting his grandfather, and had forgotten to turn it back on. It wouldn’t have been the first time it had happened. Armin’s room was close enough that Eren could easily get his attention, even if Armin had the curtains closed. It seemed like the only option left at this point.

            He glanced again at his phone. Two minutes to go.

            _Now or never_ , Eren thought, and moved across to his window. He drew the curtains aside and reached down to lift the pane, but that was as far as he got.

            He could see now what had kept Armin so busy today that he’d never thought to check his phone.

            Armin had turned his bedroom window into a display case. ‘Merry Christmas Eren’ was spelled out with letters from one of those shiny holiday garlands. Armin had clearly cut one of them up in order to get the letters for the name, since 'Eren' was hardly a common find in the standard packages. Armin had taped a (quite terrible) drawing of a trumpet to the glass, with musical notes issuing from the bell. A small Christmas tree made from pipe cleaners and paper sat on the sill—Eren recognized it from way back in first grade, when their whole class had made them for an art project. That wasn’t the only thing Eren recognized, either. The whole upper pane of the window was covered over with all the Christmas cards Eren had ever made Armin—decorated badly in marker or coloured in crayon or made entirely of cut out construction paper. Armin had even hung multi-coloured Christmas lights around the window frame. They made the whole display glitter.

            Faced with that, there was nothing Eren could do other than lean against the windowsill and try not to melt where he stood. If he opened his window and hurled a pencil at Armin’s, Armin would have to dismantle the display in order to answer him. Eren did not have the faintest delusion that it would be worth it. Clearly it had been set up as either a last word to Eren on Christmas Eve, or a greeting on Christmas morning. Eren didn’t want to take that from him, even if he had no idea why Armin had gone to such lengths this year.    

            He left the curtains open and crawled into bed. Before his eyes drifted shut, he was so busy watching the play of the coloured lights on his walls that he forgot to look at the clock and despair that it was now five minutes after twelve on Christmas morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost...there...  
> The next chapter might be a bit long-ish and I have rehearsal tonight (which is normally when I'd write it), so it might not be up in time? I'm still PLANNING to have it published tomorrow, but if not I wanted you to have a heads up


	12. Chapter 12

            Eren had failed. He wasn’t as surprised about it as his early-December self might have liked, but so it was, and it _stung_. He crushed all thought of it down during the first hour or two of Christmas morning, while he and Mikasa and his parents opened their presents from each other. He was successful, too. He was able to really genuinely smile when he opened a present from Mikasa and his mother and found that they’d got him a pair of hockey skates in his actual size, for when his leg healed more fully. He did the same when Mikasa thanked him for the stack of videogames he’d gotten her (some of which predominately multiplayer, so she could play with Sasha), and the sweater (black, with a snowman knitted onto the front; it was a bit ugly, and she absolutely loved it).

            Even for all that and the fact that he was actually able to enjoy the morning, any attempt to keep from thinking about Armin was utterly pointless in the end. This was proven when Eren received his first text of the day.

 

**Eren! Sorry I didn’t text you back yesterday I left my phone downstairs**

**Merry Christmas! My parents say you can all come over whenever you want**

**(I got a book on whales!!!!)**

 

            Eren was having a hard time sulking, knowing that Armin was that excited about whales, and that he’d put together that whole window display yesterday.

 

**Holy shit nice whales r the best**

**Does it have pictures??**

**Yeah and they’re really high quality I need to show you**

**This is the best book I have ever seen in my life**

            Armin said that a lot.

            A few minutes later and Eren and his family were going out the front door. Mikasa nudged his arm with her elbow while they made the few-second trip to the Arlerts’ house. She knew something was off. Eren just shrugged.

            “You didn’t tell him?”, she asked in a low voice. They’d reached Armin’s doorstep now and were just waiting to be let in.

            “Couldn’t,” Eren said. “I tried, but his window was all…” It’d be difficult to explain. “So I can wait.”

            “Until when?”

            “I don’t know—New Years’? Start of term? The end of the school year…never… It’ll peter out anyway, eventually. I'm thinking maybe I should just let it? Less stress for everyone that way.”

            “Or maybe not,” she said, more firmly than he’d expecting. 

            He made a face.

            “We’ll see.”

            When Armin’s father answered the door, Grisha and Carla followed him to the kitchen while Mikasa and Eren went through to the living room. Armin was already there, sitting at the centre of a pile of books—on geography, on sea creatures, on fictional adventures. Eren was a bit relieved that he hadn’t gotten Armin any of these. Books were his natural instinct as well, but clearly Armin hadn’t been lying when he’d said he had no shortage.

            Mikasa gave Armin his present first, since she had no awkwardness to surpass before offering it up.

            “Aah!”, Armin said when he unwrapped what turned out to be not one but four calendars. One had pictures of nebulae, one had old maps of older cities, one had all the least photogenic sea mammals, and one had food. "These are so cool..." 

            “I couldn’t choose,” Mikasa said, looking a bit embarrassed.

            “No, it’s perfect—I’ve got a lot of empty space on my walls still. I’ll put them all up tonight.”

            Armin had gotten Mikasa three painfully pretty bracelets (one red, one green, one blue), and a few bags of coffee beans of different varieties. Mikasa had just recently discovered a profound love for the drink, but hadn’t worked out what she liked or how she took it just yet.

            “I don’t know if any of them are any good,” Armin said, “but they smelled kind of nice.”

            Mikasa seemed to agree, given that she’d opened up one of the bags to smell it and hadn’t withdrawn the lower half of her face from it yet.

            Eren was next up. It was either act now and give, or wait and receive, so he held Armin's present out to him immediately.

            “It was all I could think of,” Eren said, when Armin had unwrapped his gift and found himself holding a set of wooden mixing spoons—or rather, a set and a half. Eren had talked the clerk into giving him two with treble clefs and one with a bass clef carved into the curved mixing surface. Their handles were long and terminated in what were clearly meant to be drumsticks. “But I don’t mean I didn’t think about it, or anything like that. I did! That’s why there’s three. The treble clefs for me and you, and the bass clef for Mikasa. Because, uh. You’re really not a good liar at all. You didn’t screw up the cookies. So if you’re going to go around making extra batches for people, they should at least be providing the utensils for that, I guess. So you know it’s…appreciated. And stuff. Plus this way you can annoy your parents like we used to.”

            They, like a lot of children, had got their start in music (or noise-making) by hitting things they'd found in the kitchen with other things they'd found in the kitchen. As a kid Armin had been fascinated by the different sounds the different pots made when struck. Eren had liked doing much the same thing, but mainly because it was loud.

            Armin probably could not have looked any happier or more surprised if Eren had just given him the keys to his very own undersea palace.

            Before he could thank Eren, however, Armin’s phone rang—not buzzed, not beeped, but rang. It had been lying forgotten on the floor, but Armin managed to find it beneath the piles of tissue paper before the caller gave up.

            “Um, hello?”

            Even from where he sat, Eren could hear Jean’s voice on the line.

            “Hey, Merry Christmas. Or whatever. Are you guys coming over?”

            “Yeah! We’ll just be a few m—”

            “We can go now,” Eren said.

            “You haven’t opened your present yet,” Mikasa said. Eren shrugged.

            “I can do it later. We should get going.” He slid off the arm of the couch he’d been leaning against and made for the hallway before they could argue with him. He wanted to get over to Jean’s right now, as soon as he could. Seeing the broad but embarrassed smile on Armin’s face when Eren had explained his present was really going to be the pinnacle of the day; he didn’t want to jump right into opening some perfect present from Armin and remembering how lopsided this whole situation was. He wanted this good mood to last as long as it could.   

            So he stumped over to the front hall, where he’d left his crutches, and sat on the stairs while he did up his bootlaces. There was conspicuous silence from the living room for a few moments before Armin appeared in the hall with a slim, wrapped present hugged to his chest.

            “Is something wrong?”, Armin asked.

            “What? No, not at all,” Eren said, and meant it. Everything was actually going quite beautifully, except for his abject humiliating failure to confess to Armin—but he’d come to terms with that.

            “Okay. Well. I actually had a really hard time finding a present for you this year too.” He settled the present on the steps beside Eren and then moved back again politely. “Especially after everything you said about how good I am at finding presents, it just got…really impossible…so it’s not that good. You can open it whenever you want.”  

            “Armin, you made a huge window display for me. It's not every day I feel that..." 'Loved' would have been the next word in that sentence, and it really was the one he meant. Given the circumstances, he thought he'd better not. He shook his head quickly. "Appreciated. I kind of came over here expecting not to get anything else from you, because that was way more than enough in the first place. You could’ve fallen out the window and died, trying to put those lights up, and it must have taken you forever to find all those cards.”

            “Oh. But that was—different. It wasn't meant to be part of your present. I was just trying to…cheer you up, I guess.”

            Eren squinted at him.

            “Why?”

            Armin fidgeted again and didn’t look directly at Eren for a moment.

            “Because you've been sort of off, recently. All month." He shut his eyes briefly as if he were bracing himself. "I know you don’t want to hear about this on Christmas, and I wasn't mentioning it since I thought you’d talk about it with me or Mikasa, if you wanted to, and you hadn’t said anything to me so I thought that must have been deliberate, but—um—basically you still seem kind of down, and I've been worried. Mikasa noticed too. And...alright, this is going to sound really presumptuous, no matter what I say...” He breathed in slowly, and as he released the air he drew a dirty, folded-up piece of paper from his pocket and held it out to Eren.

            Eren stared at it for a moment, and then took it and opened it.

            “I found it the night we played the parade,” Armin said. “It was just on the ground by the clocktower. I thought maybe it had blown off of somebody’s music stand and was going to take it back to them, but then I recognized your writing and—I didn’t read it! Not past the first few words. It seemed really private. But I mean, it was pretty obvious what it was…? I’m sorry I didn’t give it back sooner. I just assumed you must have thrown it away, since your stand and your music was still all where they were supposed to be, and you hadn’t gone running to find anything. And I know this probably has nothing to do with it, since I’m sure you already told whoever it is how you felt, but whether it’s this or anything else that's been getting to you lately, even if you think I don't want to hear abot it, if there’s anything I can do to help I’d want to know. I mean—you’re my best friend, and if I could help you in any way…I'd want to do that. Me and Mikasa are here for you is what I'm saying, really.”

            Eren scanned quickly down the page and confirmed two things. Yes, this quite certainly was the confession he’d first written for Armin; and hell, was he ever glad Armin had not read it. It was overdone and flowery and just not right at all. He crumpled it up and stuffed it into his pocket, just in case Armin should get curious all of a sudden and lean over to read it.

            “Sorry,” Armin said. His hands had formed fists at his sides, but Eren was familiar enough with Armin to know that the only person Armin was considering punching in the face at the moment was himself. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I—”

            “Do you mean it?”, Eren asked. Armin blinked down at him.

            “Mean what?”

            “That you’ll help in _any_ way.”

            Armin straightened up immediately and all of a sudden looked almost frighteningly battle-ready. 

            “Yes!”

            “Then can you just listen while I say something embarrassing? That’s it. That’s the whole deal.”

            “I—yeah, sure.”

            Eren didn’t let himself take a breath. He’d come to suspect that if he did, a car would drive into the living room at just that moment and he’d have to postpone yet again so that they could haul some poor sap out of the wreckage. He'd let this drag on so long already that Armin was apparently running in full-blown emergency support mode all the time, and that needed to stop. There was no time for preparatory breaths or premeditated notes. 

            “I like you. As in I have a crush on you. And that note was for you and I had Jean put it on your stand for me but it blew away, and—you found it and didn’t read it, because you’re great. But if you had it would’ve been super obvious it was for you. And the Secret Santa was for you, and really kind of everything I was trying to do was too. If I seemed weirdly tense around you, it's not that I'm miserable or anything. I’ve just been sort of pissed at myself for not being able to just tell you outright. And—yeah, that’s about it. So I guess, what do you think we should do? Or _I_ should do? You're one of the most important people on the planet, and I don't want to screw up the fact that I get to be one of your best friends.”

            That had not been nearly as difficult to say as he’d expected, even now that Armin was looking at him so directly. 

            “You—” Armin stopped himself. He looked as if he needed to sit down. "Wow, that is…that’s such a relief.”

            That felt even more incongruous than when Armin had mistaken his confession for a profession of love for snow. For a moment Eren thought that Armin had somehow again misconstrued what he’d said. He opened his mouth to repeat it more clearly (he didn't know how, maybe just a 'ARMIN I LIKE YOU ROMANTICALLY'), but Armin went on at light-speed. “This whole time I was really worried and trying so hard to be supportive for you while you sorted out this crush situation, and I was scared I was going to mess it up because I like you too and I didn’t _want_ to because it felt so selfish when you were obviously having problems, but then I also really don’t know how to be supportive in a situation like this? I've never had a friend who was pining before so I was basically just throwing food and movies at you, which is probably pretty pathetic, as far as support goes.”

            Four pivotal words were nearly lost in the surrounding sentences, but not quite. _  
_

“I—wait, really? You like me?” Armin nodded. He did not look halfway as embarrassed about that as he was about his perceived failure to support Eren. “How did you not just— _guess_ , at least, that it was you, if you knew I had a crush on someone and if you had a crush on me? It should’ve been so obvious!”

            But of course it wouldn’t have been—not to Armin. Jean and Mikasa and anyone else who’d been paying attention had spotted it easily enough, but Armin had trouble placing himself at the centre of things. He spent so much of his time thinking about the stars and the oceans and the world. Eren had never been sure whether all that vastness had made him feel small, or whether it helped make him feel part of some general bigness—whether it had been the cause of or the relief from the realization.

            It was a useless, false realization, as far as Eren was concerned. Armin was not small to him.

            Armin just shrugged.

            “Sorry…?”, he said. Eren scowled at him even though he tried not to.

            “There’s nothing to be sorry for. Just—so then does this mean that—are we going to be dating?" He pointed at Armin. "And don’t ask me my opinion! You go first.”

            Armin laughed a little—the exact sort of nervous laugh Eren had been so scared of receiving. It was much less terrifying now that it was actually happening, and when it was accompanied by Armin biting momentarily on his lip and doing an excited, subconscious little bounce.

            “I’d want to try it, as long as you did too,” he said.

            For a moment Eren’s thought process got so loud that he couldn’t really discern any individual thoughts, so he said, “Aghhh?” Armin laughed again, more nervously. Eren pulled himself together. Right. Straight answers. Clear communication. That was what they were doing here. Not inchoate happiness that might be confused for anything else.

            “So we will, then,” he said. “Right? That’s—what we’re doing now. We’re going out. Together.”

            “Yeah, I think we are.”  

            “Okay! Yes! That’s—” He sprang to his feet, or he tried. Moving with that much vigour was something his ankle still wasn’t quite prepared to accommodate, so all he really did was launch himself upwards and then fall directly on Armin. Fortunately for both of them, Armin had his wits about him more than Eren did. He managed to neither drop Eren nor tip over and fall flat on the hallway floor.

            “Did that hurt?”, he asked. He'd waited to speak until everything had stopped moving and he was sure he wasn’t going to lose his grip on Eren and deposit him at the bottom of the staircase.

            “No,” Eren said, even as he clung to Armin for dear life. 

            “I don’t know how I feel about getting told I’m bad at lying by someone as awful at it as you. Don’t mess up your ankle again, please? I think it gets worse with repeat injuries, and then you won't be able to even beat _me_ when you race me and Mikasa next time we skate.” Eren wanted to laugh, but he wanted to rest his forehead on Armin’s shoulder even more.

            “I guess we should get going,” he said once he'd done so. It was surprisingly comfortable. “Jean’s probably getting all impatient.”

            “No. Mikasa said to tell him we needed a few minutes to get ready.”

            They had time, then, even if it was only a little. Eren moved back again to put his weight on his own foot. He’d been meaning to say something, but now that his face was this close to Armin’s, he completely forgot what it was.

            It was just as well. The lack of words left room for him to finally just act. He kissed Armin’s cheek just as Armin had kissed his and could only hope that Armin wasn't getting robbed in this deal, and that he'd just gotten as warm and as unbearably happy as Eren had that first time.

             As it happened, Eren's hopes were realized. All that fuzzy-minded, word-obliterating happiness was not, however, enough to stall Armin out as it had done to Eren. Eren had barely finished before Armin darted forward and pressed his mouth to Eren's.

            It was a good thing he didn’t turn and run off right that minute to go tell Mikasa they were ready to go. If he had, Eren really would have fallen over.

           

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DONE  
> Next time I get the brilliant idea to start a fic I want to publish this regularly, I'm going to need to finish it before I actually start publishing chapters, because wow that was both exhilarating and terrifying to write  
> (If anyone's wondering what Armin got Eren, he bought him the official tenth-grade trumpet basics book, and also 'borrowed' the music folder of a careless upperclassman and photocopied all their band music so that Eren could tackle harder stuff than they're given in ninth grade, since Armin loves how Eren plays and thinks he's got all kinds of potential)


End file.
